You'll Soon Be Able to Play WoW Without Spending Money

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/you-ll-soon-be-able-to-play-wow-without-spending-m/1100-6425629/

You'll Soon Be Able to Play WoW Without Spending Money

Blizzard to let players buy game time with gold, and gold with real money.

by Chris Pereira on March 2, 2015

You'll soon be able to play World of Warcraft without spending a dime of real-world money, provided you've got the necessary gold.

Blizzard today announced the WoW Token, a new item that will soon be introduced to the MMO. The Token is purchased with real money (a price wasn't announced) and can then be sold on the auction house. In other words, this effectively lets you buy in-game gold without resorting to doing so through a sketchy third-party site.

What this also means is that in-game gold can be used to purchase a Token, which can be redeemed for 30 days of game time. This doesn't exactly make WoW a free-to-play game, but it does provide players with a new, highly desirable way to spend all of that gold they may have amassed.

The manner in which Tokens are sold is a bit different than regular items. When listing it on the auction house, sellers will be quoted a sale price based on supply and demand. If the seller finds the price acceptable, it'll be listed for sale, and that amount will be sent to his or her mailbox once the sale is complete. Buyers, on the other hand, will be purchasing the Token outright--there won't be a bidding process.

Once a Token has been sold, it becomes Soulbound, preventing it from being sold again. This is presumably done in order to prevent players from taking advantage of the marketplace by buying low and selling high.

A Q&A on Blizzard's website delves into the nitty-gritty of Tokens, but of note are the potential benefits it sees with regard to buying gold. Essentially, providing a way to buy gold without using third-party sites--which tend to get their gold from hacked accounts and things of that nature--is good for everyone.

"Buying gold from third-party services negatively impacts the game experience for everyone," Blizzard says. "The overwhelming majority of the gold these services provide comes from stolen player accounts, halting the victims’ ability to play the game and contribute to their guilds. On top of this, gold selling companies often farm resources using hack programs, sell fake product codes as a scam, and spam entire realms with ads to buy gold, disrupting the game in very real ways.

"The WoW Token allows players to exchange real money for gold in a secure and sanctioned way—together with the ongoing efforts of our developers, support staff, and anti-hack teams to stop the exploits these companies use and help players who have become victims of their operations, we hope the Token can help make World of Warcraft a safer and more enjoyable game for all of our players."

Blizzard didn't announce a date for when Tokens will be introduced, but there's no reason you can't start hoarding your gold now.

Base game price of expansion pack = 200% the price

Monthly fee = £9.99 a month

Microtransactions = £20 mounts, £20 skns

Powerboosts £49.99 to max your char

And not gold selling.

What, a, joke.

@BSC14

Eve Online been doing this since day launch... good for Blizzard...

Does it include expantions? probably not...

About what amount are we talking here? 1000000 ingame gold for a month of game time?

Beat me to it... by an hour.

This is great news though, it provides competition to gold farmers and gold thieves, it gives casual gamers shortcuts for progression and it gives hardcore gamers something to spend money on.

Great news indeed. Now we just need to be able to buy kill-points in Quake and Counter-Strike to provide more competition against hackers, give casual players shortcuts for skill progression, and it give hardcore gamers an extra something to spend money on to brag about. Would be nice if we could freely purchase any gear we wanted with real money in DayZ too. More options is always good for everyone, right?

Those games are competitive PvP games where buying advantages can directly impact your experience in a negative way. WoW, is a PvE game where gold allows you to get some consumables and mounts.

How exactly will your experience be negatively impacted when John Doe buys a token to get some gold?

Track record has shown that these kinds of business models, while they dont completely curb out gold selling, helps combat gold selling.

Good. Wonder how much gold they'll go for though

Yeah, gold doesn't really do that much for you except allow you to ignore a single metric in the vast number of metrics required to increase your character's power. As mentioned, it's basically Eve's model where you can play for free if you earn some obscene amount of in-game currency monthly or translate money into gold (and it's not like there weren't plenty of ways you could do the latter before).

-Byshop

Indeed, at its worst. This is just a mitigation of a currently existing "evil".

At least gold sold this way is,

1. Not farmed by bots
2. Not stolen
3. Safe for the consumer
4. Does not involve obnoxious spamming in trade chat

EVE's model was brilliant. Hell, EVE did so much right, it is no wonder why it is one of the most influential, and well known mmos out there.

Yet it's still a metric that you have to be concerned about. A bottleneck, if you well. You can't do everything you want to do without gold. Thus it is of some importance.

So I pose the question - why would anyone buy an RPG game that incentivizes you to spend more money to have a better character? Sure, gold isn't as big of a factor in the end of things, but it's still a factor. You can trivialize it - but it's either a completely pointless aspect of the game, or it means something. And last time I played WoW, no matter what level, gold still meant something. If only to most of the people playing it, and not the veterans who have absorbent amounts of wealth.

Hey - Valve would be mitigating all those aimbotters. Everyone wins - following your great logic. Maybe Valve can start selling CS:GO players cash boosts at the beginning of their matches too. It's only a small factor, it's no big deal.

And Lol @ PvE argument. There aren't guilds racing each other to beat every new dungeon introduced into the game? Let's not be naive. PvE content is still competitive for people. Just because it doesn't incentivize gold for you specifically doesn't mean there aren't people who now feel like they might have to spend gold to keep up with their friends who like to breeze through content.

I can't help but feel something like this would have absolutely gone wrong with consumers if this was implemented the first year the game came out. It's cool now though because the only people who are fanboys enough to play WoW at this point have likely been spending extra money on 3rd-party services anyways. Blizzard's idea of balance has really changed since they launched. Remember the character transfer restrictions back in the day? Didn't that have something to do with balance? What exactly changed about the game that Blizzard thought their balance-oriented policy makes sense no more?

Really, all I see is the quality of the product going down while the milkage goes up. It's been happening gradually since the game's release.

As mentioned, Eve has been using this model since the beginning and it hasn't ruined it. In principal, I agree with the idea that you should not be able to buy progress or power in a game with cash but at the same time I'll look at every metric and judge it on its own merit and not the principal.

-Byshop

I played the new expansion and really enjoyed it myself.

Soon™

Now ←-------------- Very Soon -------- Soon -------- Soon-ish(er) ------- Soon-ish --------→ End of Time

They are saying they will do this for months now.

They just specified that the tokens will be soulbound after the first purchase...