I had been looking at the the website with the graphs showing the price of the WoW token over time and I think that it might have an interesting history to tell. https://i.imgur.com/o9rRCvo.jpg
Prior to BFA it was a very high 376000g per token.
After BFA released it dropped down to about 157000 at its lowest. Over time towards the end of the year 2019 it has been rising again due to expansion burnout until in November it made a U-Turn and started dropping again, now it seems to have stabilized recently albeit with a slight downwards trend.
As far as I know the price rises when more people buy game time with gold while it drops when people buy gold with real money.
“Something” in November seems to have encouraged more people to save their gold instead of spending it for game time and/or to have increased the number of people buying gold with tokens.
Do you think that over the next year up until Shadowlands as the 8.3 content gets more stale that it will rise up to similar or greater heights with the end of Legion (its all time high point)? Or will that “something” make more players saving their gold and/or buying more gold with tokens and thus conclude BFA at a lower token price peak than BFA?
This is just a rather random discussion I wanted to make after looking at the graph.
Wasn’t it November that they announced that Long Boi was going to become unobtainable? I’d say that’s your “something” that caused people to buy a bunch of tokens/save up gold. The same might happen at the end of BfA if people realise they don’t have enough time to farm that last bit of gold so need to buy a few tokens to get it before it’s gone
I just want to add that it’s lowest point was not 157 k but more in the lines of 20 k. When the token was released in wod you could buy tokens for 20 k and then it sky rocketed due to the inflation .
Now to add in to the discussion the token get’s cheaper to buy when something is announced/something exists that devoids the playerbase of gold. Such as brutosaur mount new rep mounts etc(anything that takes actual gold out of the game like BFA did). And then the token gets extremely hard to buy when something appears IRL that can be bought with money made from the token(Virtual blizzcon ticket,New games in the launcher,shop mounts).
With a trend for the token to be harder and harder to buy with gold as expansion goes on because the inflation rises and people already have spent money on the npc goodies.
That’s my 2 cent on the entire thing,not an economist or anything but that’s the trend i’ve been seeing since the token was introduced in wod(Except when it skyrocketed at the start to go to the correct price).
Thanks for the input Holystephan. I wanted to clarrify that what I meant by lowest point was within the time frame that I mentioned (jully 2018 and now). Yeah I am aware that in WoD a wow token costed peanuts in terms of gold compared to now.
It will be very interesting to see if the wow token in bFA will follow the trends of the past 2 expansions or if Actiblizzion will drown in Brutosaur money
Forgot to add , rising of wow token price wasn’t because of xpac burnout. It was because they buff gold gains again. You are right about price being increased during times when new games being available on launcher. It happened during bfa pre order and wc3 reforged. Demand was way more superior then supply.
Like sateass said, the garrison gold is the main reason the token went as high as it did both in WoD and Legion so I doubt we’ll see it go that high again unless they add a similar system.
I’m actually a bit surprised it is as high as it is right now given how sparse free gold is with old raids and the odd emissary being the two big ones but it’s probably due to 100s or even 1000s of people still sitting on legion gold. It has consistently been going down apart from special occasions like new store mounts, new expansions and new bnet launcher games.
Didn’t played Wod but i remember during legion i was generating a wow token each week cuz i had 9 alts with strong enough followers to clear missions
There’s a link between active playerbase and token price (although it’s not just “-50% token price => -50% pop”) which should be taken into account at some point. Legion had the late tower for 7.3, while 8.3 content isn’t nearly as replayable.
The token prices droped mainly because gold is much harder to come by in BFA than in legion. Some folks managed to reach gold cap from the gold mission, which helped with the extreme token price of late legion
With BFA it’s much harder to just farm raw gold each month for a token and thus you have to rely on the AH. Early BFA was the morst part of the expansion (especially 8.0.5, game was dead back then) so the token price just dropped
BFA also introduced the long boi, which took a lot of money from the economy and helped reduce the inflation
Then came classic, where all these rich wod/legion players used their money to play for free in classic, which just skyrocketed the token price to its current value
Based on that :
As long as classic is going strong its players will buy tokens and maintain the current price
If 8.3 manage to keep players busy (and the AH healthy) then it’ll maintain the price
If Blizzard release a way to earn a lot of raw gold like the gold missions of legion the prices will skyrocket once again
Picture the argus patch when garrison gold got really out of hand but instead of 1 patch it was the whole expanson lol. WoD gold was insane because you could recruit guys who gave 25% more gold per mission and then you could stack 3 of those on the same mission.
I forgot to add that in general the economy has an inflation going around. Because we are pretty much generating gold out of thin air for every missions we do,item we vendor, mob we kill + vendor thrash. In bfa blizzard has tried to alleviate the inflation and curb it harder than Wod and Legion.
Leaving asside that the mission table was butchered from being a gold goose(which was the correct way to tackle the issue) extra items to the BMH , but most importantly the scrapper has been one of the most influental one along side expensive rep mounts(100 k per rep + 20 k the ground and big boy 5 mil).
The scrapper is often outlooked in the ecuation but pretty much what it did was instead of earning 50 + g per each item vendored people scrapped them for items which are being sold in the community (which means even more gold out of the community instead of extra because of the Ah cuts) it also made 3 item slots basically non vendorable. It has cut off around 250 or more daily gold per person that would otherwise been earned by vendoring (and creating inflation).
I believe we won’t get to see things go above 270 k in terms of token maybe 250k by the end of the expansion.(The measures keep the token in check much tighter but i pray it’s enough this time).
With expulsum being a thing and professiong being able to craft high quality gear and eat through all of your expuslum stuff they i can say mostly everything? Unless they are buying/making bracers.
Every trinket also has 100% to give you an expulsum so those get insta scrapped always from what i know.
The only time I scrap non-azerite stuff now is when I end up at the scrapper before a vendor I can sell stuff to and have a couple vendorable items. Can make like 50 bracers for the vendorprice of 1 item so I stopped scrapping for expulsom.
I spend more then half of my playtime during 8.0 on scrapper to craft darkmoon trinkets.
Literally buying leather or linen if it is cheaper and craft tons of bracers to scrap. Made like 3m from trinkets but lost my will to live in exchange.
, you can read about trust levels and how they work in the pinned