Sunday 15 March 2015

Soft-nerfing BRF

Blizzard put out a sunday-message giving a stetement about more Ilvl's on BRF-gear. The Idea behind it is that for players coming out of Highmaul, the new gear of BRF is a lot of times not really an upgrade. The extra 5 Ilvl's also extend to the tier4-crafted gear, and the apexis-gear...who even uses that?

There are several things I think about this. First up, I do like this. There some Highmaul gear in my bags, that I do not use, because of Tierpieces. Euipping the 2pT is a very big upgrade for me, even if one of those is Normal, and not heroic. Basically, my Normal Tier-shoulders are better than my Mythic Highmaul shoulders.

Wait...why are you doing Normal BRF, when you did Heroic Highmaul?  Training people. Innovation is doing the Normal versions of bosses before we try them on Heroic. That works best for us. So for Innovation, this is a great change.

The biggest problem what I have with this, is not the extra Ilvl's, but how this happened. 4 different levels of raiding, two different raids that are current, and each of them dropping normal gear, warforged stuff, gemmed stuff.... I can no longer see if a lower-Ilvl piece of gear with a socket, is better or worse than a higher Ilvl piece.

These days I have Mr Robot open during raids to quickly check if a drop is actually worth going for, and most of the time, it is not. If the piece is not WF, or gemmable, it is mostly useless. These 5 Ilvl's may just be enough to make it clear from the outset which is better.

It just feels like this Monstrosity of Item-levels Blizzard has created, and it only looks like it is spiraling out of control. Considering that in the first Tier of raiding, there is a 70 Ilvl gain, at this rate, we are going to need an item-squish every expansion...

Thursday 5 March 2015

The Gold must Flow

My mind is still thinking about the ramifications of the gold-token. Blizzard has stated that they will probably change their policy with the Black Market Auction House prices, I guess they will be higher after the introduction of the wow-token. They have to do that else, who would buy a token for real money in the long run?

The normal AH will probably fluctuate a little after the introduction. There well be some new gold in the market, and some prices of high end drops may go up, but that will not contimue indefiantely. Most of the time, in what I see, price is not really determined by how much people want to pay for it, but mostly by availability. The more of something special there is on the AH, the less it will cost. The tendecy of sellers is to undercut everyone else.

And even IF people have more gold, who knows if they really want to spend it on something they have seen cheaper before? I wouldn't in real life, so I would probably won't in WoW either. But that's on the normal AH, where supply (mostly) and demand is in order. The BMAH is something differently.

On the BMAH, the startprice is set by Blizzard, which will be higher when the token comes. And this is the only place where buying a token for ingame gold makes sense, because the BMAH has a very low supply, of very rare items. And by making the startprice higher, Blizzard actuallly puts in place the part of the system why people would buy a token. The normal AH itself would probably not make enough havoc to make it work, but very rare stuff..well.

But I am still a little 'worried' about the whole system itself. I still think there will be more people wanting to use gold for gametime, then vice-versa. Taking myself as an example, I would probably buy one at the start of patch 6.1.2(or whatever it is going to be called), just to see how it works...and get an achievement probably....

But, in my example of this monday, I used 15 euros for 30k gold. It is actaully not that difficult to get that amount of gold during a month while just playing. Some gold-scavengers with your followers. The income of the salvage yards. Doing an old raid. Gold comes from everywhere.

Finding that treshold where the euros match the gold will be a hard trick to master, and will go upwards. If I buy a token, and get 30k in return. A second 30k will be less worth for me. A third even less, and there comes that point, very fast, where the euro-gold transfer will not be in my satisfaction.

But, it will be nice for people with some gold on their accounts, who haven't played in a while, they can come back for a month with goold from ages past, although I wonder, if there is much 'frozen'gold on defunct accounts.

What will happen according to my non-economic mind?

The first few months it will work nicely, but than the supply of tokens on the AH will become lower, the original sellers now have enough gold, so they are not using their euros anymore. So, to keep the system going, more gold for less euros is needed, but that will mean the gold-price will be to high for some of the people. So, it's waiting on that month, where to few people actually bought a token from the AH, so the supply is high.

The sellers of the tokens will then feel the impact. Not only did their token not sell, and in their mind that is a waste of real money. The next month the euro-gold conversion is lower.  You get less gold for something that may not even sell... so why would I do that? The believe in the system is gone, doubt rises...And you have the beginnings of a real WoW-commerce-crash.

Monday 2 March 2015

Gold, Gold, Gold everywhere??!

Blizzard is going to sell game-tokens for real cash (euros for me). These can than be sold on the auction house (not traded, only sold). The selling price will be determined by Blizzard. No undercutting.

 A quick google-scan learned me that 1000 gold sells for about a half euro. My current subscription is 12.99 euro/month. Now, I am not sure blizzard is going to sell these for 12 euros. It will probably be a little bi more expensive. Lets go with 15 euros for a game-token.

Question: Would you buy a month of WoW for 30k gold?

No, I have a decent job. I don't feel the need to buy gametime with gold.

Question: Would you buy 30k gold for 15 euros.

No, maybe. The problem here is the need for gold. At the moment I have sufficient funds.

The maybe is because I am not only playing on Argent Dawn. I am also playing on The Sha'Tar, where my funds are considerably lower. So, a one-time infusion of 30k there would not be bad. But that is a onetime-thingy.

For myself, it is the fact that I am not going to buy expensive 100k alliance-bikes. I don't have the gold, and it is just a mount. Would I pay 40 euros for that mount? No way. Now, there are enough people out there who might do that.

My gut-feeling says, there are probably more people with excess gold who might use it for some game-time then there are people who would buy the actual tokens for real money. And then Economy kicks in... but I am a Science-guy, so I am not going to delve into that too much.

Although, more buyers then sellers would probably better for Blizzard, it means tokens will always be sold. The moment it goes vice-versa, more sellers then buyers, the whole system collapses..for a time.

I am not a fan of this new (possible?) token, but also not really against it.

Sometimes it is too much?

I should have played much more last week, I had a vacation. But when I logged on on wednesday, I found out that the new recipes where sold by traders who only spawned sometimes. Even worse, no trader spawned on wednesday itself. I was not amused.

Although I didn't play in Vanilla, the first year of TBC was almost the same looking at recipes. A lot where not always available from the seller, or in faraway places. I remember just sitting in Everlook and clicking the seller every 10 minutes orso, hoping the ecipe was available. There was also this trader in the desolace, which only spwaned after someone did a quest.

I never found that fun, so I actually didn't play that much last wednesday and thursday. It even affected my raidmentality last thursday, I was not really in it. I did my stuff, but that's all. Lucky, on friday it went better again, and I even did some LFR's with some alts.

I suppose I just had a little WoW-overload last week, happens sometimes I guess. After Friday, I went into overdrive. Doing all the stuff again. What I do miss, is a continous guildchat while logging. I sometimes miss parts of conversations due to alting.

A lot of my alts are now using the new heirlooms. I have a full strength-plate and cloth-set for my alts. I did not go for the mail and leather, considering I only have one monk, and another hunter to level. The rest are clothies and plate-wearers.

..and I was reminded that I completely forgot about the new pets somewhere this weekend. Something for next vacation I guess.

Two discussions popped up for me last week, which I may need to delve into a little more in a later post. The first was a guild-discussion about reforging. Some people are seem to hate it so much. The other was about the Holy Paladin weapon in BRF.

Yeah, there is none. Which was a discussion on some boards, with most people just going for the 'is just LFR' or 'join a normal raid' camp. Being a 'free'raider in Wrath, I have objections to those two. Not that I think that every slot should be available in an LFR, but again, later post.