First and foremost, whether WoW is essential or not; irrelevant.
Second, the competition is within a region, 99.99% does not compete with other regions. And the ones who do, basically play it as work. Thus we can ignore those in this “non essential”-argument.
Third, your comparisment with a 200 head start is just nonsense. They prob run on the exactly the same shoes, I honestly doubt they are or should be “equally” priced.
Didn’t read the entire thing but I did glance at the prices you posted.
In my opinion you can’t have equality since it’s based on a capitalist model. Every region is its own separate economy where the gold prices are driven by supply and demand.
Not enough people buying tokens? Increase the gold payoff for tokens.
As for real world money prices it’s not uncommon for products to have different prices due to varying local economies. If you check the russian/ukrainian steam store most games will be 25-50% cheaper than they are on US/EU market.
Because then everybody that’s not from eastern European countries would use a VPN to register his/her account like they are Romanian, Bulgarian etc and would easily abuse the lower price model even though they are for example Norwegian and could afford it more easily. It’s just way too open for abuse.
The currency difference isn’t something wow specific. Everything in the world is that way. You often find things to be a lot cheaper in some areas around the world and a lot more expensive somewhere else.
The bigger issue is that this game has passed 15 years, and people STILL CAN’T CHANGE REGIONS.
A poor bastard who decides to move to a different country? Well screw you. Spend another expansion and subscription cost and start all over again with zero gold, mount, characters, heirlooms and so on. Who gives a damn about you anyways? I’m sure adding a recolored mount for islands was more important than this.
This part:
Now going on your last comment:
Yes it is a issue. Because the supply it’s not infinite. It is dictated by the number of players that buy tokens with real money.
If it is really infinite as you say, than all my “suspicions” above come true. Agree?
I appreciate your “tries” to justify the price difference, but sadly i don’t think we want to go on this path: taxes payed by Blizzard. This is another totally different topic where if we go, there is no end. To end it swift, i can give you these examples:
-sacking hundreds of Blizzard employees while the company announced their best revenue year in their history
-2018 and 2019 negative tax claim and evasion
Let’s say that Blizzard pays more taxes in China than in US. And that is a proven fact and if you want to convince yourself, google it.
I think regarding the playerbase number, we can both agree that since BFA started, WoW had a constant monthly decrease in number of players. Compared with Legion, where officially they estimated the number to be around 7-9 million active subscribers, BFA has less than half that number.
I don’t need to be a “scientist” to realise that: during Legion, i was waiting even 10-15 min to complete a world quest because there where so many players doing the same quest, not to mention that when i was queing for any type of content (LFR, Dungeon or BG’s) i never waited more than 5-10 min to join. Now, beside the fact that basically i almost play a solo-game (excluding raid,dungeon and BG content), the maps are empty (taking in consideration i play on the highest horde populated server,Draenor) and also the fact that i need to wait 1h to join a random LFR or 2h to join a BG…
But also most of people don’t afford to spend due to uncertainty of tomorrow. Many people lost their jobs due to the Corona issue and they can’t afford to spend. I think that should be also taken in consideration.
Me neither, but what i can say for sure is: BFA population reduction compared with Legion + Corona isolation where people can’t afford or have uncertainty of tomorrow = less token buyers. Yet, somehow, the token value proves exactly the opposite.
I just said it bro :
No offense, but is it so hard to ask you to be reasonable? If you don’t have the patience to read someone else’s opinion, why bother to enter in the discussion? Just for the sake to add a comment? What is the reason?
I am pretty sure that the same car will be NOT sold at a HALF price, just because it’s sold in a “less rich country” . Yes, let’s say that i understand and agree that there can be a price difference of 10-20, even 30 % , but 50%? No way. Show me a real example where the same car is sold in a country with a price and sold in another country at half price. I am really curious.
I didn’t asked. That’s why, next time read the entire text before replying:
A wish and a request are two totally different things. If i woulded asked, then with the “asking” would also come the threat. Ex; “Blizzard, if you don’t change the token price, i quit the game, bla bla …cry cry…snif snif” …But i didn’t.
You don’t get it, so let’s try this:
If a mount cost 20$ and you are from UK, today you would pay 17£. If you are from China, you would pay 150 chinese yuan. If you would play from EU you would pay 19 EURO. If you would play from Romania, you would pay 90 RON (romanian currency).
If tomorrow your country’s currency would go up or down, Blizzard would not be affected by it, because you would pay the same 20$ at your current day exchange rate. So for example tomorrow instead to pay 17£ for the mount, you would pay 16£. The day after tomorrow, your currency would go low, so you would pay 18£…but in the end, you would pay the exact 20$ at the current date.
So, no matter from where would you play (country), you would pay the same fixed 20$ at your current exchange rate of your own country.
But, instead to apply a fixed currency (which in most of games is US dollar due to it’s stability and value) and price, Blizzard chosed to apply a fixed price depending regions. But by doing this, they favoured some regions and disadvantaged others. And that’s why we have this “price inequality”.
How? GPB was always above the dollar. Never the dollar surpassed the GPB value. So how would you pay more?
Actually, you payed and still pay more for the monthly subscription than a US player. You pay now 9,99£ for a monthly subscription. A US player pays 10$ for a monthly subscription.
9,99£ = 12,43 $ at today’s exchange rate.
Enjoy spending 2,5 extra dollars just because you are from UK. :))
You’re right. How was i so blind to not realise it. Thank you for opening my eyes.
And i just asked:
Maybe next time…
…you should read all.
They don’t allow it for exactly this reason:
…and i must agree with Synthium. He is right and makes sense.
…
I want to thank the majority for coming with good replies and opinion,especially Sandsh, you’re a smart and logical person, i like people like you. Except a few “apes” that decided to ruin the “party” , most of you brought a lot of good arguments and opinions. There might be still hope for WoW…who knows. 
The higher the supply, the lower the gold price
The higher the demand (for a token bought with gold) the higher the gold price
China has significantly lower wages, Im not suprised a cheaper token real money wise costs more than double the gold price on EU. Simply because Chinese supply is lower and the demand is higher.
Dude, I don’t mean to be rude but your text is way to long.
You;ve cherry picked. It’s explained, the reason buying more makes it worth more is because of how the AH works. If no one buys, then the price will go down by default as it undercuts. If everyone buys the price goes up as the cheap ones are gone. It is not confusing. You’re being an moron on purpose.
Hey don’t ask me. Blizzard can do whatever they want with their business plan. If it works then it works.
If they don’t care about losing the eastern EU market it’s their loss.
Not gonna read a 2000 word essay just because the title is mildly interesting. If you want actual answers maybe you want to summarize your points better.
I agree it has a big impact here in the EU, but i wouldn’t be suprised if that was less the case in China.
But i think we might be slightly talking across eachother, i was probably not clearly describing it. I didn’t really mean the downsteam impact of whatever the value of a token is. Because, you’re right, if a token ends up costing 150k for a reasonably long period, then we’ll see people selling boost-like services for “coincidentally” 150k (or multiples thereof). But that’s not really Blizzard’s concern i think.
What i ment was, long before the wow token even existed, in the EU region, both money=>gold and gold=>gametime purchases were already common. People bought gold (with money) from shady gold seller sites. And those shady sites, they got their gold from various sources: sometimes from draining compromised accounts, sometimes using exploits/duping, sometimes by botfarming gold and (more importantly here) from rich players selling their gold to goldseller-sites, in return for gametime-card-codes (effectively money) which such sites usually sold as well.
Now, Blizzard was not involved then, so it was essentially a free market. Competing gold seller sites would spring up and undercut the existing ones and so forth. Such a thing is impossible to police, so long story short, BOOM eventually wow-token enters the market. Wow-token is wayyy more convenient (no more breaking the ToS and fearing repurcusions, no more risk buying from shady sites, no more scams, fast, reliable, yadda yadda) so the goldseller sites practically die out and vanish. I’m sure they’re still around, but their marketshare was for sure decimated.
I can easily imagine that in China, they control a bigger piece of the pie than here (currently). Pure speculation though, but that was the point i was trying to make.
Well, there would in many cases not be a character associated with the purchase. But even if it was account names (or somehow character names), that means they’re basicly posting the names of users that are making purchases on their store, i wouldn’t be too sure this doesn’t violate some privacy laws somewhere. I certainly wouldn’t be happy with it.
Besides, you know plenty of third parties would be aggregating that data 24/7. And plenty of people use their same character or accountname on other websites or games, which means inevitably it ends up collated and merged with a 1000 other datasets, tied to real persons and sold around.
Besides, as a way of “verifying” Blizzard’s word on the wow token process, it would be pretty unreliable at best, unless you recorded the sales for a prolonged period yourself and performed various forms of statistical analysis against the dataset. That and maybe do spot verification and/or controlled buys.
How could there be foul play
If all is kosher, then for every Money=>Gold transaction, there is a Gold=>Gametime transaction.
We know the gold matches (as in, if wow token is listed as 170k, then we know 100% for sure, that you either receive or pay 170k for it, as we effectively verify this every transaction). So there’s no shady stuff on the gold side. Not a single piece of copper.
As for on the real money side, both prices are fixed. Either a 20EUR price one way, or 13EUR value (price of gametime) the other way, both those prices again are verified with every transaction. So we know they get exactly 7EUR from every Money=>Gold transaction. Technically there’s also a profit margin within the 13 EUR of course, but since the alternative to the wow token would be someone paying 13 EUR straight-up, we can ignore that (out of scope).
So if all checks out then they’re getting 7EUR for every Money=>Gold transaction, and nothing for the related Gold=>Gametime transaction. For conversation sake you’d split the difference and say both players effectively paid a 3.50EUR transaction cost to Blizzard.
Now, if Blizzard is skewing the market, pretending Money=>Gold sales are more common than they really are (or Gold=>Gametime sales less common than they really are), then they’re essentially skipping the step in the chain that makes them money. They’re not doing the step where they collect 20EUR, but they’re still giving away the 13EUR-value gametime in return for 170k gold. The gold is worth nothing to them (they could already generate it at will), so this would hurt them massively with no upside for anyone involved. Clearly, this isn’t happening.
The opposite is the only plausable scam. Where they are pretending Gold=>Gametime sales are more common than they really are (or Money=>Gold sales less common than they really are). In this case they’re just generating gold (which costs them nothing) and selling it for 20EUR. Great profit margin. However, this “scam” is them offering to sell 170k gold for 20EUR, and if you decide you want that, and you pay the 20EUR… you get 170k. There’s no immediate victim, they’d just be misrepresenting the system (with all the related risks when being found out), for no real benefit. If they were to just put 170k gold for 20EUR in the store, it would sell just as well without the charade.
But maybe there’s value in people thinking its a balanced closed loop system, and now Blizzard can control the gold-value of the token by increasing/decreasing the amount of fake transactions.
Ok but, however much gold they give buyers for their 20EUR, it costs them the same. Generating 170k = free, generating 100k = free, generating 500k = free, and no matter what they offered them, they pay 20EUR.
If they lower the gold value, the Money2Gold purchase becomes less attractive, which means they get less units of 20EUR, so they lose out on real money (clearly not happening).
If they increase the gold value, and offer you MORE gold for your 20EUR, which is basically the only possible illicit move they could be making, as far as i can tell. Then they’d attract more Money2Gold sales (more 20EUR units!) at the cost of dilluting the value of gold for the entire playerbase. It’s the MMO equiv of a govt just printing itself more money, they’d be poisoning the economy long term, for short-term gains. I don’t think this all that likely. And the way this situation would present itself to us, is the token price climbing up and up and up. And you’d ask yourself “who on earth is paying 600k for 30day of gametime ?” “or 700k ?”, while this could happen in theory, we’ve seen the opposite trend for a long time, the wow token is currently cheap, so i would pose it isn’t happening.
So
TL/DR: If you take away the ways how Blizzard could be cheating the system, that are either of neutral- or negative financial value to them, then the only things left that i can see is them artificially cranking up the price of gold to effectively bleed the game dry short term, while killing it long term. Since the wow token is cheap and even getting cheaper, this hypothetical doesn’t fit with reality so i trust it.
Ok that was wayyyyyy too long winded and too much typing. I’m going to call it here and consider professional help.
Guys, please. Let’s do it this way: we live in a democracy. Nobody is forcing you to come into this post and share your opinion. But also you can’t enforce your opinions on me just because you read the title or the first 2 sentences. So you expect me to answer your opinions, but you didn’t even bother to read mine. Why should i do that? How can i have a conversation with you guys, if you don’t even know my ideas and opinions? These are basic human communication requirements that needs to be “completed” before even starting a conversation. Makes sense?
And yes, the text is long, because this topic has a lot of “ramifications” or “sub-topics” (regions, economy, currencies, taxes, comparisons, etc) that also needs to be covered so that the main idea as a overall can be understood better. It’s not my fault, it’s the topic fault.
I don’t want to be rude, but try to understand. Please.
So can you explain this:
and this:
So you want to explain me that a country with a population almost triple than the entire EU continent and with a “spending power” of 20% more than EU continent, buys less tokens at half price than EU? This is what you try to explain me? xD
I have quite a reputation for being “extremely rude” and i don’t want to go on this path together. We could have a normal and civilised conversation or we can go on your “path”. But i don’t think it serves us good to do that. Do you?
I think you are a smart and intelligent person. You don’t need to use “insults” to add more logic to your arguments. I think we are both mature enough and we already passed that “twink” stage in our lives where we rely on insults to argument ourselves better.
It’s all to make more money…
If you think you can convince a soulless corporation to take steps to make less money, then more power to you.
I wish you fortune on your crusade.
Because in 2005 the pound was worth about $2 and now it is only worth $1.3 dollars. So for a $20 sub price I would only have paid £10. Now I would be paying £15.40 for the exact same thing.
Inexact exchange rates I know but used for broad emphasis.
They can’t if every country had it’s own servers they could but if they do it now the wow economi would go crazy. Because ppl will just use vpn to get tokens cheap.
All that for if you can’t be bothered to read it don’t post? Now you know why people aren’t reading it.
You talk about countries population while others talk about ingame markets. Why?
One thing you need to know, Blizzard did not start all regions tokens at the same amount of gold. https://wowtoken.info/
Maybe, but let’s not forget that Classic players also pay for the same sub. So you’re talking BFA+Classic vs Legion, not BFA vs Legion.
Also the metrics of how many people you see while questing and such are very unreliable, as changes to the phasing system and warmode and the like affect that much more directly than changes in player numbers.
We have no window into this, besides the expense of buying a wow token here or there may be nothing compared to what those same people would have spend day in day out on various things in pre-corona life.
Also, don’t forget, many stores have actually seen a massive boom due to corona. Some grocery stores have allegedly already hit their xmas milestones, so there’s no reason the same couldn’t be true for wow tokens, i have no insight one way or the other.
Maybe, just maybe, Chinese players are less interested in buying tokens, even at half the price the rest of the world pays for them, and more interested in playing and grinding the gold themselves.
We know for a fact that most asian MMOs in particular are a lot more grindy in nature than Western MMOs because the playerbase prefers that type of game. So playing for longer hours to make more gold in game than going to a website and buying a token fits into that model better.
Which also explains why the token is priced lower in that region as Blizz are trying to lure players, who would normally spend longer in game grinding for their own gold, into buying a token.
It’s different. I’m talking about someone who moved country. Not someone who claims he’s from another country. The first one can easily be checked with documents, like passport, residential info, etc. The second one is just a vpn use.
They’re not doing it because it’s not worth it. No money comes from it.
And who cares about the inconvenience of some random players anyways? Statistically speaking, people who moved are a lot smaller than general playerbase who didn’t. Not worth the investment, specially now that you can force them to pay again for another expansion on the side.
I did not read the whole post but it makes a lot of sense that the token in “richer” countries costs less gold, people have more money thus they can buy more tokens for real money thus flooding the market thus makaing in game tokens cheaper if you are buying them with gold. And also since more people have money there is less demand for buying game time with gold as its not expensive for them to just buy it with real money.
Every company actually does that, for example the car industry,
In some countries the car is way expensive than in another country.