Blizzard has been adamant for years that it's not currently considering a switch to a free-to-play format for its popular World of Warcraft. That's still true, but the developer has come up with a new plan for introducing non-subscription-based options into the massively multiplayer online game.
The solution is something Blizzard is calling "WoW Tokens," and it may look familiar to people who have played Eve Online. As with the latter game's PLEX, WoW Tokens can be purchased by players with real money. They can then turn around and sell the Tokens on World of Warcraft's auction house.
Other players can purchase WoW Tokens off the auction house with in-game gold. Once purchased, they can be redeemed for 30 days of game time.
Unlike Eve Online's system, players will not be able to set their own in-game gold prices for WoW Tokens. Instead, they'll be exchanged to the auction house at a rate based on a special formula Blizzard has developed. This will take into account supply and demand for Tokens as well as other elements of the World of Warcraft economy in each region.
Since Tokens are sold at a set gold price, they're also not resellable. Once you've purchased a Token from the auction house, it's soulbound to your character and must be redeemed by you.
According to World of Warcraft lead game designer Ion Hazzikostas, this new system doesn't have anything in common with a move to free-to-play. "They're completely different," he told Polygon.
Instead, Hazzikostas says the system is more of an answer to shady third-party gold sellers. Players who want to spend real money to earn in-game gold now have a legitimate way to do so directly through Blizzard. The developer is hoping this will help stop third-party sellers from compromising the accounts of innocent players to steal gold.
Hazzikostas isn't ready to discuss specific pricing of tokens nor how much in-game gold they'll sell for, but he says it will be competitive with the third-party gold sellers that Blizzard is trying to put out of business.
Hazzikostas says Blizzard is currently planning to provide an option for lapsed subscribers who may have a lot of gold sitting around to log in and purchase Tokens without having to purchase a subscription at all. In effect, if you have enough gold saved up and continue getting lots, you could never have to pay real money for a World of Warcraft subscription ever again.
Unfortunately, WoW Tokens won't be available without logging in at all.
"The way it's built, it's very integrated into the World of Warcraft experience from the buyer's perspective," said Hazzikostas. "It's something that you get mailed to yourself and use just like any other item. It's connected to your character, so it's not something that could be done through a browser."
WoW Tokens will launch in each of the game's core regions — Americas, Europe, Taiwan, Korea and China — with each region having its own pricing based on supply and demand there. Blizzard has no set date for when WoW Tokens will launch beyond "in an upcoming patch."
Hazzikostas also declined to reveal what pricing will be for Tokens, though he said that gold prices will likely fluctuate a fair amount in the early weeks before stabilizing.
For more on World of Warcraft, check out our review of its latest expansion pack, Warlords of Draenor.
Comments
Bye bye gold farmers. :D
By DiiiGiiiTAL on 03.02.15 2:37pm
Gold is rarely "farmed" these days, most of it is stolen from accounts with weak passwords and no 2-step verification.
This new thing will do very little to stop that.
By JannyWoo on 03.02.15 4:23pm
Hopefully what it is doing is reducing the demand for a 3rd party product, which at the very least simply makes what they are doing far less profitable, as they will most likely have to drop their prices significantly to compete with the safety and convenience of doing it directly through Blizzard.
By Justin Hixson on 03.02.15 6:34pm
The sellers still have operating costs, even if those costs are minimal. By continually undercutting them on price, it becomes less worth their time as they lose more and more customers to the official Blizzard system. It doesn’t even have to become unprofitable for them to continue operating in WoW for this to discourage them. I just has to become less profitable than an easy alternative such as selling gil in Final Fantasy XIV, for example.
By ildon on 03.02.15 7:26pm
See, I don’t think they will undercut the price. Taking EVE as the example again, bought ISK is always cheaper than buying and selling a PLEX if you purely look at the $ to ISK ratio.
Stealing gold from an account is very low effort and the margins are sky high. That’s why there can be so many competing gold sellers out there and they all still make a profit. You may see some consolidation but doubt we’ll see this make any real impact.
By JannyWoo on 03.03.15 2:08am
What they are trying to stop is people giving their cc’s to shady companies to buy gold. When presented a cheap option to buy gold within the game maybe it will eat into the gold sellers profits enough that they either are put out of business or at least hurt enough that they are much less rampant.
If its the same price or even cheaper to get gold that way I would say yes, everyone will do it that way and those stealing gold would have little reason to do so anymore.
By Grawbad on 03.02.15 7:50pm
I don’t think you’re right there. Blizzard really doesn’t care about what you do with your credit card (unless it is to pay them) or even that you buy gold. Their major problem is that bought gold comes from hacked accounts (support overhead) and that it causes inflation in their in-game economy which may drive less affluent players out of the game.
By JannyWoo on 03.03.15 2:10am
Seems like a fantastic move if implemented reasonably. Certainly will encourage some old players to give the game a chance again. Should create a set of existing players as well that focus the majority of their time on going infinite. I’d expect it would cause the cost of items on the auction house to drop in price significantly as well which everyone will probably enjoy.
I wonder if they would ever consider dropping these tokens as a reward for a boss kill.
By veneretio on 03.02.15 2:41pm
You’re rather optimistic. I highly doubt they will ever make it a drop.
By Sejian on 03.03.15 7:24am
Sounds like it will still have a subscription, but you can pay for it with tokens.
By Ashley__ on 03.02.15 2:42pm
Not so much what it "sounds like" as much as that being exactly what they said :P
By rob.ricardo on 03.02.15 2:47pm
I was thrown by the article title.
By Ashley__ on 03.03.15 5:34am
This sounds liek a model i could get behind. Assuming i don’t need a kings ransom to get the tokens, I could potentitaly make enough gold to get another 30 days just for playing :)
By clrblndmax on 03.02.15 2:46pm
You can be reasonably sure that it will, in fact, cost a king’s ransom. Unless you’re one of those top .1% players who can make millions of gold per day, this probably won’t be an easily sustainable model.
In EVE, where this system has existed for a long time, PLEX prices are ludicrous amounts of money for all but the richest players/corporations.
By Nicholas Payne on 03.02.15 3:14pm
Anyone outside of high-sec can easily get together enough ISK for a PLEX with a few hours of effort a month. That it’s for the top .1% is nonsense.
Yes, in high-sec it’s pretty hard with just missions and mining…that’s exactly the point.
By JannyWoo on 03.02.15 4:26pm
Other than the most basic functionality, this is actually a lot different from PLEX and even serves a different purpose from PLEX. WoW Tokens are designed in such a way that they cannot become a commodity. The amount of gold you get for each token is fixed at the time of purchase, and they’re not tradeable and there’s no logical reason to hoard them. The sale price is also fixed and determined based on supply and demand, but can actually be different from the quoted amount when the token was originally purchased and is completely controlled by Blizzard.
The goal of the WoW Token system is to discourage gold sellers from operating within WoW. This means the price will most likely be set at a value that will undercut those gold sellers, or at least be cheap enough that no one thinks it’s worth the opportunity cost of going to a third party gold seller rather than going to Blizzard. If they did cost "a king’s ransom" they would not serve this purpose at all, and would essentially be pointless, from Blizzard’s perspective.
It also actually doesn’t even matter if only 0.1% of WoW users took advantage of the system, as long as the majority of that 0.1% were the same people who would have been buying gold from third parties.
By ildon on 03.02.15 7:34pm
So as an outsider looking in, the goal of WoW Tokens in not to incentivize me to pick up the game then? Or is it the title/article that sold me to believe I could ideally do a trial of WoW, get just enough gold for a token, and use it to fund my desire to continue playing? If it’s a minority they’re targeting these efforts for, I guess I would be out…
By brutedawg on 03.03.15 1:13pm
It would likely be a significant effort to get enough gold for a new player, to the point where you’d need to have the latest expansions and be level cap to reach it. You can’t get above level 20 in the trial, and I think you still have to buy the expansions separately.
By Rawkzilla on 03.03.15 3:33pm
you’d have to be extremely active to do a game for free like that. I think Tera has a similar model, and the gold needed to buy a ticket is pretty extreme. Usually you’d have to be farming end-game loot to get that.
It’s aimed at people with cash, to be flexible with how they spend their cash and not be locked into a sub.
By TheReyRocka on 03.04.15 1:26pm
No! You can’t have the last of my free time, Blizzard!
The Pay-wall was the last defense I had against going full basement-neckbeard-hermit.
By Silverspud on 03.02.15 2:51pm
Neckbeard….uuuuggghhh I think I"m going to throw up….
By MacGyver1911 on 03.02.15 3:21pm
Could they be called Tolkiens?
By Stephen Crow on 03.02.15 2:56pm
<3
By MacGyver1911 on 03.02.15 3:27pm
LotRO, you missed your chance!
By Kenogu Labz on 03.02.15 4:38pm
This article makes no mention of a player buying tokens for their own use, only that I can buy and sell. I presume the option exists for self-consumption? If so, they we know the rw price point per token should be less than the lowest monthly sub cost, otherwise why wouldn’t I just subscribe.
And the in game cost needs to be high enough to increase barrier to entry, but low enough that I don’t have to grind all month, just to earn the right to play next month.
Why not instead give me the option to just buy time? Similar to burner phones, let me pay $ per hour, which I can use whenever I want throughout the year. They could define rollover option, like anything less than x hours rolls over, if I logged in within 30 days of the anniversary.
The biggest reason I favor SWTOR is that I don’t have to worry about playing enough to get my money’s worth this month.
By pottsy523 on 03.02.15 2:57pm